I looked at him sheepishly. "What can I say?"
"You can begin by explaining how you overlooked a third man in the pursuing car. Suppose it had been one of their enforcers instead of Dr. Prufro?"
"Hell, there was a lot happening out there, Mr. Shearing." He'd once invited me to call him Harry, but I hardly ever did, and this didn't seem to be the time for it anyway. "He must have got out of the car and stayed hidden, not moved at all. When we bailed out of the VW we were trying to stay alive, not see who was chasing us, you know."
"Miscounting the number of men hunting you is not the best way to stay alive. As it happens, you are correct. Prufro tells us that he was forced to accompany Bert Packs, as he knew him, because Packs was getting worried about you, and wondered how many sides Prufro was playing on."
"So he was their leak, after all."
"Yes. The CP has been blackmailing Dr. Prufro for a long time. To avoid helping them, he contrived to get himself fired from Sandia Corporation. Or so he says, we haven't bought all of his story yet. It was through Prufro that Packs entered the Information Associates organization."
While he talked, Shearing kept an eye on the map table. I saw that the red block, which seemed to be Steen and his escorts because the others were black with numbers on them, was driving around in the Pacific Palisades, up and down streets in a random pattern. The other cars were in a box about a mile on a side around it.
"Wasn't that kind of nutty?" I asked. "I mean, why would a CP agent pose as a free-lance information buyer?"
"Apparently there are people in this country who will sell information to a clean-cut young man like Vallery when their scruples prevent them from dealing with the communists. But that wasn't Packs' primary mission. He was after the same thing we are."
That one whizzed right past me and I said so. The reading out seemed to be postponed, but I was pretty sure it would begin when there was more time. I pulled a folding chair away from the wall and sat where I could see Shearing and watch the map board. If they weren't going to chase me out, I was interested in what happened next. I got my pipe out, still thinking about Shearing's last statement. "They were looking for the Chinese agent?" I asked. "Wouldn't they know who he was?"
"No more than we do. The Chinese have no love for the Russians. I don't suppose there is anyone they do think of as friends at the moment. In any event they aren't going to trust one of their top people to an ideologically unreliable ally like Moscow. This agent is quite special to them, he really is an antimissile scientist. You've already seen the lengths the CP will go to prevent Peking from getting that kind of information. Packs wanted to find the Chinese contact, probably to eliminate him."
"And the poor old geezer was being blackmailed."
Shearing nodded. "Hardly surprising. The vast majority of people who work for the communists do so out of fear. Many of them convince themselves they are doing the right thing, of course. People do have a tendency to try to justify their actions to themselves. But Moscow has never been very enthusiastic about employing someone they don't have a more tangible hold on. Presumably the Chinese will use the same technique since most of their people once worked in cooperation with the CP net."
"What happens to Prufro now?"
"We can place him on a college faculty somewhere and get him a grant to do classified research. The CP will find him and try to use him again, and we'll run him as a double agent." Shearing took out the Camels, lit one, blew a smoke ring. "He may not last very long at that, but then again he might. He has some experience trying to keep Vallery unsuspicious."
"Hard on him, isn't it?"
"What do you want us to do with him? He nearly got you killed three different times, are you really concerned about him?"
"No. Not really." I suppose I wasn't. I didn't like the pompous old man—he wasn't really all that old, but he acted like an old man—but there was something a little pathetic about him. Well, I suppose it beat going to prison or worse, which was what he deserved. "What about Vallery and Henderson?"
"That will depend on the outcome of this operation. In any event we will want to know all about their buyers and sellers for the Bureau. After that I may have another use for them . . . . Sam, do they seem to have any fixed direction yet or are they still playing games with us?"
"Still moving about, señor. They will long since have assured themselves that they are not being followed visually, we must presume they are attempting to detect an electronic tracking device."
"Yeah. Better hold off pulsing that unit much."
"I have. That is why we cannot be sure where they are at this moment."
Shearing nodded in satisfaction, leaned back with his cigarette. There was a cup of cold coffee on the windowsill behind him and he drained it. "Let's just hope they don't take the simple method and strip Hoorne. Or if they do, maybe they won't throw his shoes away."
"You have a tracker in his shoe heel?" I asked. "Be easy enough to pry them off and see."
"Not the heels, in the soles of his sneakers," Shearing said. "And it isn't just a tracker, it's a transponder. Know how that works?"
I dredged up my electronics and thought for a second. "You've got a transmitter and a receiver, and it only transmits when it gets pulsed from the outside."
"Exactly. So the transmissions are very short, and we hope not likely to be detected by any sweep they may make. When all we could do was get an unarmed man sent to their agent, this seemed the best procedure. After all, we went through this whole charade so they wouldn't suspect our involvement. It ought to work."
"What if it doesn't?"
"We have alternate plans, but Steen is pretty much on his own." He looked at his watch. "I could wish they would knock off the games and get moving."
We waited another ten minutes, while Nick moved the red block only once. Then he nodded, moved it again, onto the Pacific Coast Highway, headed back for Santa Monica. After a few minutes it was obvious they'd taken the Santa Monica Freeway, headed east. Shearing's chase cars were all behind the red block.
"He's out of our net," de la Torres reported. "You said to keep the number of pulses down, and he came onto the freeway quickly."
"Yeah, that's all right. Call Clover Field and get the plane warmed up just in case."
Sam turned to his switchboard, plugged in to one of the jacks. He talked softly into his little mike so we couldn't hear the conversation.
"You've got an airplane?" I asked.
Shearing nodded. "Army loan, an experimental super quiet job. Couple of boats standing by, too. I've got every agent I can trust from the whole Southwest, and it isn't enough. We're spread thin like butter on a student newlywed's toast." He looked around for more coffee, found the pot was empty. "Sam, you better get over to the airport . . . ."
De la Torres cursed in Spanish. I don't know much of the language, but when I took it in high school one thing I learned real good was how to cuss somebody out, and I recognized some of the more choice expressions. "There is no pilot," Sam reported. "I'm sorry, señor, but a civilian delivered the airplane and the army intelligence man who came with it cannot fly. He did not think to report it before, he thought we would send a pilot. We did not have a man at the airport; if the plane was needed I planned to go myself."
"God damn it," Shearing said. He said it slowly, almost reverently, as if he were inviting the Almighty to come in and personally conduct the missing pilot to hell. "These goddamn cooperative ventures never work. Nick, can you handle it?"
"No, sir." It was the first time the big man had spoken to us since I came in the room. "Not that ship, chief. It takes two hands to fly that beast. Just a second, sir." He listened attentively, moved the block of wood onto the San Diego Freeway headed north. "They're going out in the Valley now." He moved a chase car onto the Santa Monica several miles behind the red block and pointed the others toward the San Fernando Valley. "There's some traffic in Sepulveda Pass, we may catch up with him . . . oh, damn it!"
"What no
w?"
"Number three's been pulled over by the Highway Patrol."
"Using up another two or three minutes," Shearing said. He looked squarely at me. "You can fly, Crane, it's in your record."
"Depends on what the airplane is," I said nervously. "I don't like the sound of that experimental job."
"Sam, take him out to Santa Monica and get him in that plane. I want the two of you in the air. I'll take over your desk."
"Yes, sir." Sam looked at me impatiently.
"But I don't know if I can fly that . . . ."
"Get out there and find out," Shearing snapped. They were all looking at me.
"Yes, sir. All right, Sam, let's go."
Chapter Sixteen
It was the goofiest airplane I'd ever seen. They'd started with a sailplane, one of the big Schweizer jobs with about a sixty-foot wingspan, really an enormous beast to carry only two passengers. I'd flown one a couple of times, taking off by being towed behind a jeep out in the eastern Washington deserts, but that was a long time ago, back when I'd done other wild things like race sports cars. Unpowered planes can be fun, you get up and find a rising air current, keep hunting others. The whole airplane doesn't weigh much over a thousand pounds, and if you're lucky and know where to look for thermals you can stay up all day. They are, however, a sport for young and foolish people, not a married man, or so I'd let Lois convince me. I'd let my ex-wife convince me about a lot of things, I was beginning to realize.
They'd added a motor to this sailplane. There wasn't room forward of the pilot, so they'd put the motor back behind the cockpit and run a shaft over the pilot's head. The propeller was on a big strut sticking up from the nose, and the damn thing looked like a butter paddle, a big four-bladed job made out of wood. I wondered where they'd found anyone who still knew how to make a wooden variable-pitch propeller.
I looked the thing over, turned to Sam. "That? You've got to be kidding." But he didn't say anything, so I climbed into the cockpit. It seemed familiar enough except there was an extra lever over on the left, along with another handle that looked like a throttle. There were the standard controls for a Schweizer sailplane, plus a lot of instruments for the motor, and they were standard enough except for where they were placed. Little Bakelite signs were riveted to the instrument board in unlikely places, giving normal instrument values and other information. Evidently a lot of people unfamiliar with it had to fly this plane. Right up at the top panel was a big notice: "AIRCRAFT LIMITATIONS. NEVER EXCEED 6000 RPM OR 114 KNOTS IAS. SOLO FROM FORWARD SEAT ONLY. INTENTIONAL SPINS PROHIBITED." Well, that figured. Anybody who'd spin a sailplane, even one with a motor, was crazy. Another notice told me that 10° YAW ABOVE 120 did something, but the last words had been cut off the notice plate to make room for a landing-light switch.
I picked up the checkout sheet hanging on a clipboard in front of me and read it off. It was pretty complete, and under it were some more sheets giving values for engine operation and a lot of instructions on how to fly the ship. Sam had already climbed into the rear seat, which was a snug fit. The bird hadn't started with much room to spare, and the addition of engine controls and various other gear cut into it severely. There were also several boxes fastened here and there including one long one that ran past me into the rear seat area.
I swiveled around. "Look, if I get this thing off the ground we're still likely to come down hard. Christ, Sam, it isn't like getting into a strange car, you know."
"Señor, if we must go back to Mr. Shearing and confess that due to my failure to check everything twice we have failed in this mission, I think I would rather crash in the airplane. If you cannot fly it, you cannot, but if there is any chance . . ."
He looked so goddamn courageous there, and I wasn't forgetting back outside the Royal Inn he'd told me to make jokes so I'd feel better . . . . "OK, strap yourself in and we'll see. You got all your radio gear?"
"It is all installed." I looked over my shoulder to see he was right. In addition to the other junk he was wedged in with about a hundred pounds of electronics. I was glad he was a lightweight, this thing obviously wasn't designed to carry much payload.
I heaved around on the stick, looking out to see that the control surfaces did what I expected them to. Then I examined the strange handles, checked them off against the clipboard instructions, and yanked them around. As the clipboard said, we had dive brakes and spoilers, which I might have to use in landing. It even told how to bring her in on a short runway, which I thought was nice of them. The cockpit wasn't really all that different from sailplanes I'd flown, and this began to look more possible, although I'd never have tried it if de la Torres hadn't been so damn brave about it. I shoved the canopy open and started to climb out, and Sam shrugged. "You cannot do it?" he asked resignedly.
"Yeah I can do it. I can probably get us killed too, but I won't do that by running out of fuel. I'll have a look in the tanks, thank you."
The gauges told me we had plenty of fuel, but I like to know things like that myself. It took a while to find them, they'd hidden the blasted intakes pretty carefully. I unscrewed the caps and stuck my finger down in the wing tanks, felt gasoline. As I did I remembered something I'd seen once and never forgot. Once in Seattle I happened to look out the window of a jet I was about to be flown away in to see the captain, a gray-haired four-striper, out squatting on the wing poking his finger in the fuel tank. If I'd got a picture of that I could have made a fortune putting out safety posters. I even made up a story about him. Somewhere, many years ago, he'd had a gauge stick on him the day the mechanics hadn't topped her up, and by God . . . .
I released the tiedown lines and got back in, still not convinced this bird would fly, but determined to make a stab at it. Presumably it had got to Santa Monica from somewhere else, it sure wasn't built there. As I climbed in it wasn't too comforting to note the big "EXPERIMENTAL" painted across the fuselage just under the name of the Burbank aerospace company who'd built the ship for the army.
I got settled in and called the tower for instructions. "This is Experimental N5 niner eleven, request clearance and runway for takeoff."
There was a long pause, then a crisp voice came on with the unemotional tone that all flight control people seem to have. "Experimental N5 niner eleven, you have priority." He started reading weather conditions and altimeter settings, and didn't seem concerned that there wasn't a flight plan on file for us. Shearing seemed to be able to get cooperation when he needed it.
The engine started easily and I was amazed, you could hardly hear it. It wasn't anywhere near as loud as a lawnmower, more like a good car with the muffler slightly worn even when I ran her up to the redline on the tach. I got taxi instructions and let the brakes off. There aren't any brakes and landing gear on Schweizer sailplanes, but somebody'd installed very standard Cessna spring retracting gear so that wasn't any problem. The beast taxied like a normal plane, except that with that big slow-turning wooden prop out front I had the crazy feeling we were floating sideways in a chopper. I can't fly a helicopter.
I ran the motor up to redline again at the head of the runway, compared all my figures to the checkout list. There wasn't anything to it. The dual ignition system worked fine, the fuel pumps poured the stuff in as advertised. I called for takeoff and got that priority signal again, released the brakes, and off we went. At sixty knots she lifted off by herself and we climbed easily at eighty.
She flew fine. In fact, she was fun, and I stopped thinking of her as a beast. This was a real ship, but weird, because you couldn't hear the engine at all, and there wasn't much sound from the air rushing past outside. The controls were hard to work, which wasn't surprising, the Schweizer isn't really designed for either the weight or the speed we had. The rudder was sloppy as hell, first having no effect at all and then over-reacting, and you didn't get to relax and enjoy the ride, but still—she flew, and it was so quiet I could imagine I was in a sailplane. It was a funny feeling, all that quiet power, floating around over a big city.
We could have come down to a hundred feet over the beach and nobody would know we were there unless they happened to look up.
"I'm turning north and heading out toward the San Fernando Valley," I told de la Torres. "Better report to Shearing."
"I have just told him we are airborne," Sam said. "I did not want to speak to him until I was sure you could handle the craft."
"Yeah. I like confidence. Look, you're going to have to navigate, amigo, I don't know this area well at all." I had the chart in front of me, but I wasn't confident that I could watch where I was going and fly that weird ship at the same time.
"No sweat." He sounded relieved, which wasn't too surprising. Then we hit a sharp updraft when we passed over the Santa Monica mountains, and I had to shove her around a little to get back in control. She'd yaw like hell, and the nose pitched up with right aileron. There were a couple of other surprises too. When we were level again Sam continued as if nothing had happened. "You may follow the freeway north for the moment." We flew on, and I revved her up a bit more to about ninety knots indicated. Below us the San Diego Freeway wound through Sepulveda Pass, with brown hills above it on both sides. Off to our left about a million white garbage trucks snaked up and down the hills to where they were filling in a canyon with the waste from a day's living in Los Angeles. I wondered how long it would be before they had all the canyons filled, used the dirt from the hills to bury the mess, and made a nice flat topped mesa out of the steep hill country down there.
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